For website owners it is often desirable to investigate whether or not the traffic on the website generates value for the website owner, e.g. in terms of visitors to the website obtaining specific goals for the website owner, such as purchasing or ordering products or services, filling in a contact form, requesting a web based demo, ordering a catalogue, staying at the website for a specific time period, etc. It may also be relevant to attempt to affect the behaviour of visitors visiting the website in order to increase the value generated for the website owner during the visits.
US 2007/0185855 A1 discloses a method for tracking information about a visitor to a website, such as how the user arrived at the website, geographical location of the user, operating system, screen size, etc. The information is used to present optimized pages for the user based on similar user preferences. The preferences are gathered from repeated behaviours of similar users.
US 2009/0049039 A1 discloses a mechanism for improving the effectiveness of an Internet search engine at directing a user to a relevant page of a website. The superior effectiveness of a website's internal search engine is used to improve the effectiveness of an external internet search engine in directing users efficiently to the webpage that contains the information or facilities that they require.